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Carroll: Spending, but not learning

A middle school student works out an algebra problem in a Colorado classroom. (Andy Cross, The Denver Post)

You wouldn't know it from Judge Sheila Rappaport's recent finding that Colorado schools are unconstitutionally underfunded, but money isn't everything in producing high-achieving students. In fact, it's not even the decisive factor.

Across the country, "many of what we imagine as our best school districts are mediocre compared with the education systems serving students in other developed countries," write Jay P. Greene and Josh B. McGee in the current issue of Education Next after comparing math scores from 2007.

Such elite, mediocre districts exist not only in moderately taxed states such as Colorado, but in many states that the judge would no doubt cite as models of educational funding.

If you've followed the achievement debates over the years, you may be suppressing a yawn. Alarming international comparisons? So what else is new? Your kids' school is an exception, right? Actually, probably not.

For apparently the first time, Greene and McGee have refined the data to provide district-by-district comparisons with 25 other nations, mostly European but also Australia, Singapore, Taiwan, New Zealand, Korea, Japan, Israel and Hong Kong (check out the findings at globalreportcard.org).

"In four states, there is not a single traditional district with average student achievement above the 50th percentile in math," they write. So even elite districts in those states fail to exceed the average for all students in the international group.

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In 17 states, meanwhile, "there is not a single traditional district with average achievement in the upper third relative to our global comparison group."

And Colorado? Thankfully, it does a little better. Yet I count just three districts — Cheyenne Mountain, Steamboat Springs and Lewis-Palmer — with average achievement in math in the upper third relative to our global competition, with Aspen and Telluride just missing the cut. Douglas County is at 60 percent and Boulder Valley at 58 percent, to cite two other well-regarded districts.

We spend a lot of time worrying about achievement in places like Denver and Aurora, but is it really OK that students in communities as highly educated and privileged as Douglas County and Boulder perform only modestly above average on international charts?

How will they compete with elite peers from abroad if they don't do better?

Are resources the problem? "We spend far more in the United States" than most of the listed countries, Greene told me this week (hear that, Judge Rappaport?). So what's the matter? Among other things, the University of Arkansas professor cites complacency. "We're pouring all of our reform energy into the lower performing districts," Greene says, "and that's encouraged complacency" among districts that outpace them.

Globalreportcard.org also provides reading comparisons, in which the U.S. does better than in math. However, Greene explains, "International comparisons in math are more meaningful because we're pretty sure we're measuring the same thing. Math results are more strongly predictive of future outcomes, such as economic success, too. It's not that reading is less important, but we're not as good at measuring it."

He knows that even math comparisons across borders have their critics, and doesn't claim they're flawless. But he's determined "not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good." Given the large samples they work with, he's confident the achievement differences are real — and fairly stable since 2007, too.

Indeed, another recent study found that the U.S. produces a smaller percentage of advanced math students than every other industrial power. Blame it on funding if you like, but the data tell a more complex tale.

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